Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“Do not fall in love with them, Giti,” he had said. “Soon enough they will be meat on our table.”

It made her cry, and now tears filled her eyes.

“Smile for them, girl,” Omar ordered her, and she did her best to do it.

“Look this way,” the cop on the passenger side said, from the running board, his head inside the cab only inches from her. “Come on,” and he pulled her face toward him with his fingers.

He smelled terrible, rank body odor, and his breath rotten like his teeth, caked with crud from decay.

Giti forced a smile at him, then turned her eyes back to the front, where she saw an American Marine with a big knife strapped to his leg walking with another Marine and a fearful-looking dog. Her heart began to pound.

Inside the plywood box beneath the stacks of vegetables, Dzhamal Umarov, known among al-Qaeda as Juba and among the Americans as Davet Taché, and Khasan Shishani, known as Hasan and as the Frenchman, Jean René Decoux, had armed themselves with AK rifles. Their four men, Mahmoud, Ali, Jalal, and Yazen, likewise filled their hands with loaded rifles, all of them ready to martyr themselves for jihad in a bloody fight.

Juba pushed the boxes apart and put his head between them. “Whatever these men require to look the other way and let us pass, I will pay double. Tell them that. Tell them I will reward their commander as well. I have a good deal of money. But if they choose to let us die here, so will each of them and all of their families, and God will send them all to Hell. Is that clear?”

“You heard that?” Abu Omar asked the senior cop, and got a nod back.

“Good,” Juba said. “Now let’s get moving.”

“What’s going on here?” Alvin Barkley called to the four policemen crowded on the running boards, gawking inside the truck. He could see the young woman, tears on her face and her blouse opened.

The senior cop, the one who did the talking with Abu Omar, called out to the Iraqi army sergeant in charge of the squad of local soldiers. He said something in Arabic that none of the Marines understood and their Iraqi translator ignored.

The Iraqi sergeant intercepted Barkley and ordered him to back off and let the cops do their inspection.

“It is okay. Trust me on this,” he assured his American counterpart.

Alvin Barkley didn’t like the look of any of it. He could see the girl frightened inside the truck, her eyes wide open, tears on her face, and a smile forced on her lips.

“Some servant girl this old man has. She’s nothing,” the Iraqi soldier told him.

First Sergeant Barkley looked down at the sergeant. “Best you back off, cousin.”

“You cannot take command here,” the Iraqi protested, and now the senior cop stepped off the truck running board and came over.

“This is an old farmer we know, coming here for many years,” the policeman said. “He only carries vegetables for the market. He’s old. Harmless. Look at him.”

“What’s in the truck, under all that shit?” Barkley snapped at the cop. “Hell, he could be hiding a ballistic missile under that load.”

The cop laughed. “He’s an old man with a servant girl to help him. Do you think they will jump from that truck and kill us here?”

Barkley looked at Sergeant Padilla and Corporal Rattler. “Check out the truck, Sergeant. Any of these guys get in your way, turn Rattler loose on ’em. Give him that ‘Hot Sauce’ command you showed me.”

Padilla grinned, remembering how Barkley had suited up in the training pads a few days earlier, playing Rattler’s dummy, and he gave the Malinois his attack command. “Rattler! Hot Sauce!”

The first sergeant had stood a hundred feet away from the working dog, and in a heartbeat Rattler had “housed” the Marine, bowling him so hard off his feet that Barkley flipped in the air and body slammed the ground. It left the first sergeant dazed, and left the men from his company watching the demonstration laughing their asses off as Rattler locked jaws on the downed Marine and dragged him in circles.

As they approached the truck, Rattler stayed right at Padilla’s side, focused only on one thing — work. The Kong awaited after a good job done, and the big Belgian loved his reward time.

The men on the truck froze as the fearsome dog began working around the front of the truck, checking and sniffing first low, then high, and back low as Sergeant Padilla stepped along, the lead now dropped low and relaxed for Rattler to do his thing.

As the dog went up the side of the truck, one of the cops whimpered, and Padilla had to remind Rattler to focus on the detection work, sniffing for explosives, weapons, and hidden people.

Abu Omar sat at the steering wheel, sweat beading off his face now. He watched the dog go low, then high, then low along the sides of the truck. The peppers and garlic seemed to be working. He breathed a bit easier.

Omar said over his shoulder to Juba, “I think everything will be fine. He smells nothing. Relax.”

“I cannot relax until we are rolling again,” the Caucasian terrorist posing as a distinguished middle-aged French businessman answered. “We will come out shooting, killing as many as we can. Make sure these brothers surrounding our truck know this, too.”

Abu Omar nodded, and the cops on both sides of the truck nodded back.

Sergeant Padilla noticed that Rattler had begun acting differently as soon as he went high on the side of the truck, relaxed down low, but changed mood as he went high again. The mood changes were subtle but distinct cues. Intentionally discreet so that they did not tip off anyone but the handler.

Once Jorge and Rattler had made the circle around the truck and all seemed clear, he led the dog back to the first sergeant and acted casual for the tense Iraqi audience, as if all were well.

“Rattler alerted all the way around. They’re hiding something under that load,” he said in a low voice as he walked past Barkley.

The first sergeant turned and whistled at his platoon of Marines. “Let’s untie that tarp and take down all those crates of produce.”

“No, no, no!” both the Iraqi Army sergeant and the senior policeman said together. And just as suddenly, the baker’s dozen of Iraqi soldiers surrounded the truck, ready to repel any Marines who stepped closer.

“The motherfucker’s got shit hidden under all that crap. I intend to see what he’s got!” Barkley barked at the two senior Iraqis.

“You do not have the right to inspect,” the army sergeant reminded the Marine. “You are only here to support our searches.”

Meanwhile, the senior cop had already begun to talk fast on his radio, letting his police commander know the trouble, and the payoff.

Then the platoon’s radio operator shouted from Barkley’s command Hummer, “I got somebody from State Department on the horn. They’ve got orders dispatched to Colonel Roberts that we are to pack up and leave this roadblock immediately.”

“Son of a bitch!” Alvin Barkley bellowed. Then he looked at the smiling cop and Iraqi sergeant. “You motherfuckers know he’s got shit hid under that load. My bet, explosives or guns, or both, and he just put money in your pockets. Fuck you people! Fuck all of you!”

As the angry Marine walked to his command Hummer, he put his hand above his head and waved it in a big circle.

“Load up!” he shouted.

As Alvin Barkley slid onto the passenger front seat of his truck, he looked in the backseat at Corporal Rattler and Sergeant Padilla. “They’re carrying some kind of bad shit that we’ll regret letting go. You watch and see. This one’s coming back to bite our asses.”

“Definitely shit under all those boxes,” Padilla affirmed as he patted Rattler, who had his Kong in his mouth, happy.